Home Stretch

9/8/00, Albany, NY, Knickerbocker Arena

SET 1: Mellow Mood, Limb By Limb, Ghost, Bouncing Around the Room, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Saw It Again, NICU, Glide, Axilla, Taste, Golgi Apparatus

SET 2: Birds of a Feather, Windora Bug, David Bowie, Back at the Chicken Shack, Bathtub Gin > Jam > Character Zero

ENCORE: Fire

Listen

Vacation isn’t just about the travel, it’s also an opportunity for a hard reset. With seven-and-a-half weeks between tours, Phish had a chance to correct some of the wobbles that plagued the summer: jet lag, communication issues, stagnant setlists, album promotion obligations, etc. Most importantly, the will-they/won’t-they of the hiatus was presumably settled. Though I still haven’t been able to find any official communication by the band that year, the Entertainment Weekly cover story with Trey’s quote about the break came out in August and lot gossip was unanimous that Shoreline would be the finale for an indefinite while.

So, refreshed from a late-summer pause and with a longer respite on the near horizon, fall 2000 was a chance for Phish to right the ship and end their 17-year-long first chapter on a high note. By its middling and unranked reputation, I know it didn’t quite accomplish that. But on the first night at least, it sounds like they’re on the right track to leaving fans wanting more a month later. It’s not an exceptional show, but as the curtain-raiser of a new tour, it sets the right tone thanks to a few important factors.

Starting Indoors: Playing a venue with four walls and a roof is usually good for whatever’s ailing Phish. Summer sheds are far more lucrative, but tend to bring out the worst crowd-pleasing habits in the band, particularly in this era. But the energy is palpably different when both sets are played in the dark, and especially when they’re in a familiar space like The Knick.

You can hear it right away in the spontaneous crowd cheers throughout this tape – Kuroda, clearly, was not going to coast into the hiatus either. And the band gets right down to business, debuting a new cover and playing two of the songs that have shined brightest in the past year. No easing in while they wait for the sun to go down tonight, even if they go jukebox mode for the rest of the first set. As with fall 99, the ensuing weeks will be a mix of indoor and outdoor dates, but it’s nice to have some environmental variety.

Fresh Material: What’s that I just said…a new cover? After going all summer with a only a single debut — that wasn’t even sung by a member of Phish — the very first night of fall brings two new songs to the table. Well, one and a half. Opener Mellow Mood is the band’s sixth Bob Marley cover, but one of only two to get repeat performances. One might complain that it’s a bit on-the-nose to play a song with “mood” in the title for a show’s mood-setting opener, but after the new song famine* of the last tour, beggars can’t be choosers.

And when it rains it pours, as the second set introduces another reggae-flavored option to the catalog in Windora Bug. Though originated on stage by TAB in ‘99, it’s yet another tune from Trey and Tom’s 1997 songwriting windfall, and the last to crossover until we finally get that Somantin. Its long wait in limbo isn’t a huge surprise, as it’s a pretty dopey song and redundant with Makisupa in its sound and dub-jam potential, but again, see above re: beggars/choosers.

What New Album?: After that initial May promo run, Phish didn’t push Farmhouse excessively hard in the summer, at least not as much as a typical band would. But the recency of the new record did send them down some predictable setlist paths, with most nights featuring either a Sand or a Jibboo and either a Farmhouse or a Heavy Things. Now that the record has been in stores for four whole months, they’ve already forgotten its existence, apparently, as this is the first show all year to not feature a single Farmhouse track. That takes some of the shackles off set construction.

Japan Flavor: I spent all summer begging the band to import some of their post-rock improv lessons from their June visit to the Far East, eventually concluding that it just wasn’t feasible in American amphitheaters. But in the slightly more intimate surroundings of an arena, maybe there’s hope? Tonight’s late Gin might not reach the heights of the summer’s great versions, but it makes time for a very minimal and weird postscript jam where Fish hops on vacuum and Trey takes over drums while Page plays new-age keyboards. Does it reach the abstract depths of Fukuoka? Nah, but at least they’re giving it another try on this leg

There’s enough promising details here for me to overlook this show’s flaws, including another trainwreck Glide, a surprisingly sloppy Taste, and the strange, late pull of the sleepy Back at the Chicken Shack to deflate the energy built up by a very solid Bowie. But at least that’s an experiment in dynamics, a welcome one after the overcranked loudness wars of summer. A mellow mood isn’t such a bad origin point for a high-pressure tour, and it sounds like the down time, both past and promised, did them good.

* - I’m well aware that Summer 2025 is another tour that featured *zero* debuts, and yet it was spectacular. What can I say? The band is different now.